Whether or not Apple does this has no bearing on the current quality of the iPhone (But has a lot of bearing on their bottom line), but has a large bearing on the future quality of the iPhone (A vibrant app ecosystem is healthier then one where a few hand-picked winners are rewarded, and their competitors can never compete on an even playing field. Also, cutting side-deals with apps created by billion-dollar players, and telling all other app developers to pound sand (Regardless of the quality of the apps in question) is the main problem we're talking about. Somehow, the iPhone has managed to survive. A rather large amount of crap on the App Store. You argument is also somewhat undermined by the existence of. The reason that iOS is a huge market has less to do with that, and more to do with all the other aspects of what makes a good phone.

What the average user wants is for shit to just work. The average user, after all, uses Facebook.

You vastly overestimate the number of figs the average user gives about most of the privacy problems that HN grapples with. That market exists because Apple has done a great job prioritizing the protection of their customers' privacy and payment information. > The reason why developers want to make apps for iOS is because there's a large market. You're right, 'I'll know it when I see it' is a garbage sentiment that at best is a cop out, but too often is used to withhold rules and keep people in the dark as a power play, or even squash dissenters with arbitrary and unbalanced application of force. I left the project and haven't looked back. They cozied up to HR and legal who were never really comfortable with the permissiveness of the platform, and received praise and additional funding to grow the team for these clampdowns. The staff was less familiar with the ecosystem and they proceeded to clamp down more and more on acceptable content. Staff was hired so that engineers wouldn't be responsible for this. Unfortunately the story doesn't end there. If the story ended there I would still be against not having codified rules, but begrudgingly accept that it worked in that situation.

Our escalation procedure went up to banning, though nobody ever reached that point. After we judged we'd look up who was responsible for the content, and if we felt they were doing some penetration testing to see exactly where those lines were we would start to loop in their manager, HR, legal, and anyone else we felt should be aware. We avoided bias by removing information about the flagger or flagee when content was flagged and judged it based on the content ourselves. We chose not to because we were aware that if we did then people would deliberately cozy up as close to the line as they could, and that wasn't the kind of environment we wanted to foster. So we deliberately didn't codify our rules. For some reason people would forget that they were on a corporate site with their corporate email linked to it and spew garbage that any decent person would be embarrassed to say out loud. I've worked on an internal communications platform. When rules aren't codified it invites biased interpretation of them.

Download the new for apple BetterMouse